The idea of them dirty bastard kikes holding him up on a purchase of that size for just forty cents’ and the parachute guy says ‘Forty cents?’ Yair, it was like this.
The boots was twenty-two-fifty. Jiggs paid down two dollars and a dime on them and he had to pay the parachute guy’s pilot five bucks and so he never had but twenty bucks left even when he beat the bus, and so he borrowed the forty cents from the madam; yair, he left the airport at five-thirty and did all that before the store closed at six; he got there just in time to stick one of the tennis shoes into the door before it shut.
So we paid the madam and that was the next five-forty because the room for last night she just charged them three bucks for because they set in her room so she could use the other one for business until midnight when the rush slacked up and so she just charged them three bucks just to use the room to sleep in and the other two bucks was bus fare. And we had the kid and the parachute guy too now, but the driver said it would be O.K. because it would be a long haul out to the airport.
The programme said there was accommodations for a hundred visiting pilots out there and if there was more than two or three missing from the lobby of the Terrebonne it was because they was just lost and hadn’t come in yet, and besides you had told me you would fire me if I wasn’t out there at daylight to-morrow morning…no; to-day now… and it was eleven then, almost to-morrow then, and besides it would save the paper the cab fare for me back to town. Yair, that’s how I figured too because it seems like I ain’t used to air meets either and so we took all the baggage, both of them and Jiggs’ meal sack too, and went out there and that was the next two dollars and thirty-five cents, only the kid was asleep again by that time and so maybe one of the dollars was Pullman extra fare.
And there was a big crowd still there, standing around and looking at the air where this guy Burnham had flew in it and at the scorched hole in the field where he had flew in that too, and we couldn’t stay out there because they only got beds for a hundred visiting pilots and Colonel Feinman is using all of them for his reception. Yair, reception. You build the airport and you get some receptive women and some booze and you lock the entrances and the information and ticket windows and if they don’t put any money into the tops of their stockings, it’s a reception.
So they can’t sleep out there and so we come on back to town and that’s that next two dollars and sixty-five cents because we left the first cab go and we had to telephone for another one and the telephone was a dime and the extra twenty cents was because we didn’t stop at Amboise Street, we come on to the hotel because they are still here and he can still ask them for his jack, still believing the air racing is a kind of sports or something run by men that have got time to stop at almost one o’clock in the morning and count up what thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five dollars is and give it to him for no other reason than that they told him they would if he would do something first. And so now is the chance for this connotator of the world’s doings and moulder of the people’s thought to..
“Deposit five cents for three minutes, please,” the bland machine voice said. In the airless cuddy the reporter coin-fumbled, sweat-clutching the telephone; again the discreet click and cling died into dead wire hum.
“Hello! Hello!” he bawled. “You cut me off; gimme my.. But now the buzzing on the editor’s desk has sounded again; now the interval out of outraged and apoplectic waiting: the wire hum clicked full voiced before the avalanched, the undammed:
“Fired! Fired! Fired! Fired!” the editor screamed.
He leaned half-way across the desk beneath the green-shaded light, telephone and receiver clutched to him like a tackled half-back lying half across the goal line, as he had caught the instrument up; as, sitting bolt upright in the chair, his knuckles white on the arms and his teeth glinting under his lips while he glared at the telephone in fixed and waiting fury, he had sat during the five minutes since putting the receiver carefully back and waiting for the buzzer to sound again. “Do you hear me?” he screamed.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Listen. I wouldn’t even bother with that son of a bitch Feinman at all; you can have the right guy paged right here in the lobby. Or listen. You don’t even need to do that. All they need is just a few dollars to eat and sleep until to-morrow; just call the desk and tell them to let me draw on the paper; I will just add the eleven-eighty I had to spend to—”
“WILL you listen to me?” the editor said. “Please! Will you?”
— “to ride out there and — Huh? Sure. Sure, chief. Shoot.”
The editor gathered himself again; he seemed to extend and lie a little further and flatter across the desk even as the back, with the goal safe, tries for an extra inch while already downed; now he even ceased to tremble. “No,” he said; he said it slowly and distinctly. “No. Do you understand? NO.” Now he too heard only dead wire hum, as if the other end of it extended beyond atmosphere, into cold space; as though he listened now to the profound sound of infinity, of void itself filled with the cold unceasing murmur of æon-weary and unflagging stars.
Into the round target of light a hand slid the first to-morrow’s galley; the still damp neat row of boxes which in the paper’s natural order had no scare-head, containing, since there was nothing new in them since time began, likewise no alarm: — that cross-section out of time space as though of a light ray caught by a speed lens for a second’s fraction between infinity and furious and trivial dust:
FARMERS REFUSE BANKERS DENY STRIKERS DEMAND PRESIDENT’S YACHT ACREAGE REDUCTION QUINTUPLETS GAIN EX-SENATOR RENAUD CELEBRATES TENTH ANNIVERSARY AS RESTAURATEUR
Now the wire hum came to life.
“You mean you won’t…” the reporter said. “You ain’t going to…”
“No. No. I won’t even attempt to explain to you why I will not or cannot. Now listen. Listen carefully. You are fired. Do you understand? You don’t work for this paper. You don’t work for anyone this paper knows. If I should learn to-morrow that you do, so help me God I will tear their advertisement out with my own hands. Have you a telephone at home?”
“No. But there’s one at the corner; I co—”
“Then go home. And if you call this office or this building again to-night I will have you arrested for vagrancy. Go home.”
“All right, chief. If that’s how you feel about it, O.K. We’ll go home; we got a race to fly to-morrow, see? — Chief! Chief!”
“Yes?”
“What about my eleven-eighty? I was still working for you when I sp—”
Night in the Vieux Carré
NOW THEY COULD cross Grandlieu Street. There was traffic in it now; to clash and clang of light and bell, trolley and automobile crashed and glared across the intersection, rushing in a light kerb-channelled spindrift of tortured and draggled serpentine and trodden confetti pending the dawn’s white wings — spent tinsel dung of Momus’ Nile barge clatter-falque.
Ordered and marked by light and bell and carrying the two imitation-leather bags and the drill meal sack they could now cross, the four others watching the reporter who, the little boy still asleep on his shoulder, stood at the extreme of the kerb edge’s channel brim, in poised and swooping immobility like a scarecrow weathered gradually out of the earth which had supported it erect and intact and now poised for the first light vagrant air to blow it into utter dissolution.
He translated himself into a kind of flapping gallop, gaining fifteen or twenty feet on the others before they could move, passing athwart the confronting glares of automobiles apparently without contact with earth, like one of those apocryphal night-time bat creatures whose nest or home no man ever saw, which are seen only in mid-swoop, caught for a second in a light beam between nothing and nowhere. “Somebody take Jack from him,” the
